Friends have started to ask me what I’m working on next. I’m thinking of working on a book with the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership. As such, I’ve been scouring the shelves for books on women and leadership. (If you know of any good ones, please send me a post!)

As far as I can tell so far, the few books on leadership aimed at women seem to focus on ambition, promise power, and encourage readers to cultivate a “bad girl” attitude in order to achieve it. Their titles are telling: Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead But Gutsy Girls Do, by Kate White. Kiss My Tiara: How to Rule the World as a SmartMouth Goddess by Susan Jane Gilman. And most recently, Am-BITCH-ous: Learn to Be Her Now by Debra Condren. I have to say, I love absorbing these books and more or less laud their bad-ass bad-girlness. But I have two qualms with this general approach:

1) Teaching women to be smartmouthed goddesses or gutsy and amBITCHous can’t take place in a vaccuum. It’s not just inner change, but external change that’s needed (the personal is STILL political, no?)

2) These titles leave me wondering, is it possible to claim ambition as a virtue for women without having to claim ourselves as “bitches”?

I welcome any thoughts.